Rollei Retro 100 Tonal in 120

An Orthopanchromatic offering from Rollei, this film is excellent for outdoor photography and portraits.

I am one to always want to try new things when it comes to beers and film. One evening while drinking a particularly good beer from Belgium and surfing some websites, I came across some offerings from Rollei. After throwing in some Blackbird, Nightbird and Crossbird in my cart, I saw a film in a tube that looked pretty professional: Rollei Retro Tonal 100 in 120. I added a couple rolls and hit the check out button. That was some time ago. Fearing my skills at 120 cameras we not up to the challenge, I put them in cold storage for about a year, till I felt brave enough to take them on a little day trip up to the North Shore of Oahu.

The films comes in a black tube. As a side note, I find useful to keep the tube long after the film to put a fatroll in or just the keep an exposed roll dry. The paper is white and easy to see through the frame counter window . I found the negative to be clear after developing and easy to work with when scanning.

Being a Orthopanchromatic film, the film does have lower grain and good tone ranges, despite the orange filter, the skies were still very bright because Ortho film tends to pick up blues a bit better. It is an older type of film process so it gave my pictures more of a “nostalgic” look.

I had a hard time finding it again when writing this article, but it still maybe available your area. It was not very expensive and easy to work with both in the camera and scanning. I have a roll or two left in cold storage and plan to try some portrait work with those remaining rolls.

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